Film Noir

The sunny blue skies and swaying palm trees are fine for postcards.

But Hollywood seemed to get L.A. best at night — in black and white — with menacing shadows moving down a dark hallway and a flickering street lamp outside illuminating something bad, if you could just figure out what.

Film noir is one of Hollywood's most enduring genres, a decidedly alternative history of L.A. The idea was that if you scratched beneath the surface of all that beauty and delight, you'd find things decidedly ugly and horrible.

William Holden found it when he decided to outrun the repo men and turned into one of those grand mansion off Sunset Boulevard. The police found him floating face first the estate's pool. Humphrey Bogart showed that writer's block and anger issues can be a bad combination in West Hollywood.

Film noir seemed populated with naive men and cunning women, those "femme fatales" like Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck who never had to look hard in L.A. to find someone willing to do in their inconvenient husbands. Ultimately, the genre left much to the imagination. No one is exactly sure what Bogart and /Bacall were up to in "The Big Sleep," and you don't need to know what "Jake, it's Chinatown" meant to know it wasn't good.

— Shelby Grad, who has been city editor of the Los Angeles Times since 2005.

Ann Blyth, very questionable What about Oscar Wells, Agnes Moorhead, even Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. The # is almost endless.And even though these actor are from long ago the films were well worth watching.

”— Pat Maccarone, February 7, 2015 at 12:40 p.m.
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Bogart, hands-down.

”— Big Cadillac, February 7, 2015 at 3:17 p.m.
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lizabeth scott too late for tears and marie Windsor the narrow margin..

”— chris, February 7, 2015 at 5:42 p.m.
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Mark Stevens in The street with no name and the Dark Corner. He was the noir hero incarnte. Also Dana Andrews for goodness sake where would noir have been without Laura, and in where the sidewalk ends he was just great, also in boomerang a different kind of noir

”— mark Stevens, February 7, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.
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Gene Tierney &Veronica Lake, should be included on the list.......also Alan Ladd.